Chris Lombardi puts defense and security under the spotlight, as he shares his takes on recent NATO and EU cooperation and provides insight into the company’s own long-term strategic partnerships in Europe.

Three trends are currently driving the global electricity sector: decarbonization, decentralization and differentiation. Utilities are making significant contributions to mitigate carbon emissions, while a technology revolution is …

An agreement, but little progress

Nowhere is Turkey’s pursuit of ‘zero problems’ in its neighbourhood harder than in Armenia. So perhaps no moment in recent Turkish foreign policy has been more broadly welcomed than the Turkish and Armenian leaders’ agreement, last October, to establish diplomatic relations between the two countries.

Since then, very little progress has been made in reducing the stockpile of long-standing problems. Neither the Turkish nor the Armenian parliament has yet ratified the protocols. And Turkey’s relations with Azerbaijan have worsened, because opening the Turkish-Armenian border meant Turkey abandoning a policy it adopted to support Azerbaijan in its war with Armenia over Nagorno-Karabakh. Baku’s anger matters doubly because Turkey needs its energy domestically and for the Nabucco pipeline to Europe. Such concerns may help explain why, a day after the agreement, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s prime minister, said that Armenia would need to withdraw from Karabakh before the agreement could be implemented.

Troubling term

It is proving just as hard to come to terms with the mass slaughter of Armenians in Ottoman Turkey in 1915-17. Discussion within Turkey about the killings is now more open, and last October’s agreement would set up a joint committee of historians. But calling the mass killings ‘genocide’ remains a red-button issue.

Although most independent scholars believe that the slaughter of between 800,000 and 1.5 million Armenians meets definitions of genocide, Turkey argues that application of the term is open to legal debate. At the time, the term ‘genocide’ did not exist and the definition of genocide adopted by the United Nations in 1948 may not exactly match events in Ottoman Turkey.

Turkey may also have grounds for arguing that a historical and legal question should not be debated and judged in parliaments, as numerous chambers have done since the 1980s (including the European Parliament in 1987 and repeatedly since).

But the political costs of Turkey’s position were again demonstrated early this year when Sweden’s parliament and a committee in the US House of Representatives called the killings ‘genocide’. Turkey recalled its ambassadors to these two advocates of Turkish membership of the EU, Erdog?an cancelled a visit to the US and also declared that Turkey could deport the 100,000 Armenians allegedly living illegally in Turkey.

Erdog?an retracted that threat, returned the ambassadors to their posts and visited the US earlier this week (12-13 April). US President Barack Obama, who did not use the term ‘genocide’ when he visited Turkey last year, has indicated that he will not use the word in his annual statement to mark the start of the massacres on 24 April 1915.

Obama’s choice will hardly compel Turkish society to face the historical record of systematic atrocities. But, equally, the episode shows how Turkey’s past continues to overshadow its future.